Wrath of a Mad God - errors and inconsistencies and why ?

ADMIN - Please do not contact us about errors and inconsistencies you find in Wrath of a Mad God, we probably already know about them. Some explanations can be found below.

From: Raymond FeistDate: 09 March 2008

It's a plot thread that I just dropped for a bunch of reasons. That happens sometimes. Assume that Erik and Kitty never quite got around to tying the knot and she got tried of waiting around for him to put her ahead of duty. It's probably a story that I could have used as a sub-plot had I don't any bridging novels between Shards and Flight, but fact is, it just didn't interest me enough to continue with it. My only reason for introducing the relationship in the first place was to show Erik in a relationship that after I finished the novel i realized showed us nothing about him we didn't already know. It's not a bad thing, and didn't take up too much space, but we already knew he was a caring, loyal guy. She just allowed him to discover it. I might have done a better job if I had a line or two more where Erik said something like he almost got married and never had children because duty kept getting in the way.

One other thing about Erik that I didn't "punch up," because I didn't think I needed to beat the reader over the head with it. By the end of Rage, more than anything else, Erik wants to be Bobby deLongville. He wants to fill that void, but deep inside feels he's lacking, even though by his death, Erik is so much more than Bobby could have been.

Best, R.E.F.

From: Raymond FeistDate: 09 March 2008

My point wasn't the scene wasn't written, but rather I just didn't choose to follow up. Anyway, if you want to look at it as a continuity glitch, that's another way to consider it.

Best, R.E.F.

From: Raymond FeistDate: 16 October 2008

It was a continuity error. It's been changed slightly in the paperback reprint. It was a story element that got dropped and frankly, I forgot to revise. Erik and Kitty didn't stay married long, because of the "married to two wives, me and the Kingdom' sort of thing, but it got cut because it was too soap opera. No kids, though.

Best, R.E.F

From: Raymond FeistDate: 09 March 2008

The Cho-ja question is a good one and could have used a couple of lines along the way. When you're juggling as many plot threads as I do, sometimes a detail or two gets lost. The Tsurani and Cho-ja relationship changed profoundly in the Empire series, so they were pretty much an independent force by the time the Dasati arrived. The Tsurani assumed (correctly, though it never came to be) the Cho-ja would have taken a hand if the Dasati had threatened a hive; they just never got that far. And the Cho-ja would have been as helpless against the Dasati as the Tsurani were. So, in that sense, it's pretty academic.

As far as the Elves on Kelewan, there aren't any. They all returned to Midkemia after being discovered by Pug and the rift between the two worlds being opened during the first Riftwar. I may not have spelled that out in detail, but I assumed it was obvious when the eldar returned to Midkemia. I have a line or two about that in the next book, as an Eldar reflects on what happened on Kelewan.

Part of the problem is mine, i.e. things going on in my life at the time of the writing, but part of the problem is we don't have copy editors like we used to. Now the editors are expected to catch continuity as well, and they're overworked. Overall, I will confess I got to reliant on one copy editor back in the day to catch continuity stuff rather than take note of it myself.

I'm pretty adept at language, both as a writer and speaker, but that really has little to do with what we're talking about here, which seems to be for the moment some annoying continuity issues.

The way in which a book is fabricated is, simply, done in stages. I write a manuscript, it goes in for editorial review. My editor(s) respond with suggestions or questions about why I've made certain choices.

I rewrite or not as pleases me.

The ms. then goes into production.

It used to be it would be copy-edited. The best one I had was a woman named Elain Chubb, at Doubleday, who not only was brilliant, she was a fan, and she would have caught the continuity glitches. Now, copy-edit is done on the fly by the editor or is out-sources to a copy edit service. That means internal stuff may be caught, such as "he was wearing green in chapter 1 and now it's blue. Did he change?" What it doesn't give you is continuity over a span of books.

This is the first time I've really been tripped up by deadlines, rushing, and life its ownself. I'm not saying I would have caught all the errors had I made one more pass (time didn't permit) but you also have to keep in mind the difference between being the writer and the reader. You can read the thing in hours where it takes me months to write it, and moreover, it's been ten years since I wrote Rage. A lot of things have happened in my life and in the series between Eric and Kitty (for one example) and the new book. So the fan can go, "Oh, that annoys me," with justification. Me I go, "Damn, I was going to toss in a line about how things didn't work out and I forgot."

You've got a couple of assumptions in the above about a copy edit by someone I know etc. They are all pros, you understand. The problem is one of continuity across books, and I haven't had that since Rage. The only previous time I had that problem was with Prince of the Blood.

It's not something that can be easily fixed if I screw up, which I did several times in this one. Not major problems, unless you're really anal about things, but annoying certainly.

I'm going to try to avoid them in the future if possible, but as I've been working on this series for almost 30 years, mistakes are bound to creep in.

I had an undiagnosed learning disability as a kid, so my spelling was always pathetic. But I was a word mechanic from a very early age. I could always express myself, more clearly as I matured. But even now if I'm fatigued, under stress, or otherwise not in a calm place, my spelling goes to hell. The first sign is homonyms. There, they're, their; too, to, two; etc. start getting switched. As I get father down that fatigue/stress/etc. road, letters within words start getting switched, so "switched," becomes "wsitched," that sort of thing. I literally forget to spell words I could easily spell an hour earlier. Moreover, part of the problem is that I literally can't SEE typos on the screen when I'm in that place. Luckily, the word-processor flags them (most of the time; see homonyms above) and they get caught. Continuity blind spots are a different thing entirely, and really have more to do with the passage of time than anything else. See, if you don't remember a situation exists, you don't think to go back and check the details.

There was a minor plot point that got lost, really, regarding Lujan. I'll fix that when I do the paperback fixes; mostly his line didn't last very long, in a story I'll reference, but never get around to writing.

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